'Don't lose sleep': Nandan Nilekani, the brain behind Aadhaar, explains why he is not worried about DeepSeek, other AIs

Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani while speaking at the Ministry of External Affairs' Global Technology Summit said that Indians should not be losing their sleeps over the country not making their own AI models like DeepSeek.

"We should not be losing sleep because somebody has not built any AI models," said Nandan Nilekani. He added that India has set up the Indian AI mission and has small models. "Now talks should be about scaling it up," said the Infosys co-founder.

"One of the key differences between previous tech revolutions has been, for the first time, we intend to place trust in non-human intelligence. Earlier technology was deterministic and predictable. Now we're essentially expecting the machines to make decisions. There's a huge leap of faith in the ability of machines to take us forward," said Nilekani.

Why DeepSeek became a turning point in AI revolution?

A low-cost, open-source model from Chinese startup DeepSeek has triggered a new wave of competition in China’s artificial intelligence (AI) sector, pushing major technology players Baidu, Tencent, and Alibaba to accelerate their AI strategies.

Since its launch in January, DeepSeek’s reasoning model has gained attention for matching the performance of global platforms such as ChatGPT, but at a fraction of the cost. That has forced more established firms to respond quickly — with faster product rollouts, bigger investments and a growing shift towards open-source models.

DeepSeek R1, a large language model (LLM) comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, reportedly cost only $6 million to develop, whereas OpenAI spent $540 million on ChatGPT. Moreover, DeepSeek uses far fewer GPUs, significantly reducing operational costs.

Following the release of DeepSeek R1, American tech giants—including Nvidia, Meta, and Alphabet—lost billions in valuation as investors scrambled to reassess AI’s economic landscape. The disruption has underscored China’s growing dominance in AI and renewed debates over why India hasn’t produced similar breakthroughs.